7 comments:

Oooh.. you found it, Tom! I'm so happy. That thread of crumbs was dancing around in my mind for days. Inspiration is a funny thing isn't it. Thank you so much for posting it! Again such a nice surprise and present. Some people would say it's Christmas every day...

Thank you Nora! And Tom, maybe I knew because I have wandered off the pre-selected trail myself. It is more crowded than one thinks it is, off that path. Blur / Lens, that's another present today. We need the lens to see better, to see closer, but then there is this blur that doesn't occur without it. How to do? Eager to track the subject, in need of taming the subject, that subject that is always moving, why doesn't it just stand still? Every two hours I wipe off my glasses. That is just beautiful.

I'm going to assume that Marie's artistic camera work and poem will have tantalized others as they did me, and that in consequence, flocks of intrigued reader will have been looking about themselves in a whole new interested manner.

Some more Marie (and some more bokeh as it happens) can now be found here:

"Photographers know that one of the characteristics that separates photographic imaging from drawing or painting is the matter of focus. When we humans look at the world about us, our autofocus eyes tend to see everything in-focus. And that's the way artists have usually portrayed our world. While the main subject might be emphasized with brighter colors and greater detail, the less prominent objects were usually still rendered sharply. The lens — even the lens of the eye — introduces an opportunity for selectivity in image-making, portraying objects in the near field and background with a special kind of de-emphasis: out of focus. Observant photographers have noticed that not all lenses are created equal: large aperture lenses show strong out-of-focus effects while small-aperture lenses lead simply to a softening of the image. And even among lenses of equal focal length and aperture, there are differences. The Japanese apparently refer to the quality of the out-of-focus image as "boke". What is boke, and why are lenses different from one another?

. . .

"To summarize then, your camera paints its image with a repertoire of brushes whose characteristics are determined by the shape of the diaphragm opening and the details of the lens design's aberrations. Some brushes are softer-edged than others, and that's what makes the difference in boke."

That's a great paragraph about boke! It's funny how photographic terms can be applied to all kinds of situations. Once we start with boke, we can go on with lens, aperture, distance from the subject, moving subject.... it opens up the road to endless poetry.